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    Bill Buford, Among the Thugs (W.W. Norton, 1992)
    Reissued by Vintage in paperback in 1993

    Among the Thugs is a detailed, at times funny, often scary and revolting look at British football fan violence and crowd behavior.

    Buford is the former fiction editor at the New Yorker and the man who transformed Granta from a collegiate literary journal into a widely read literary magazine. In Among the Thugs, he follows Britain's notorious football hooligans over a period of six years during matches at Manchester, Turin, Cambridge, Sardinia, and Dusseldorf, using the matches to divide the book into chapters.

    Buford gives the reader an idea of what to expect in the first chapter, set around 1983. He's waiting at a railway station just outside Cardiff when a train, a football special, pulls in. The train has been taken over by the fans and they are singing in unison. An injured guard is rushed off. A fan is trying to smash a window with a table leg. As Buford heads home, policemen throng the streets, escorting passengers to the Underground since trains are being taken over by fans. Buford writes, "It was obvious that the violence was a protest. It made sense that it would be: that football matches were providing an outlet for frustrations of a powerful nature. So many young people were out of work or had never been able to find any." But as he travels and gets to know the "hooligans," Buford is proven wrong. Most of these men have high-paying blue collar jobs and their "rebellion" isn't about frustration at society.

    The violence is highlighted by his narrative of the death of dozens at Heysel Stadium in Brussels in 1985, and by the 1989 FA Cup semifinals in which 95 fans were crushed to death.

    A bestseller, Among the Thugs sold over 63,000 copies in paperback and was later reissued with a new cover. Excerpts from the book appeared in The Sunday Times and Esquire. The Guardian found it "Superbly written ... darkly exhilarating ... a sort of rollercoaster chamber of horrors."



    MORE:
    BBC profile of Buford